It’s about time: After years of scouting locations, rampant speculation about where it would land — and even one false story about its intentions to open in a spot that had many local real estate professionals scratching their heads — Whole Foods Market is coming to Lafayette.
Unlike what happened in the spring of 2011, when city leaders were misled by a Houston real estate official and prematurely announced that Whole Foods planned to go into the old Kmart on Ambassador Caffery Parkway, the word is coming straight from the grocery store chain.
In an earnings call Wednesday, Whole Foods Market confirmed it has signed a lease for a store in Lafayette that will likely open in late 2014. The Lafayette Whole Foods is part of a development of Saloom family property at Settlers Trace Boulevard and Ambassador Caffery Parkway, a tract of land separated from the Super Target center by Settlers Trace. It is unclear whether the family has sold the property or is involved in the development of this prime real estate, which sat for years classified as agricultural land.
Whole Foods spokeswoman Kristina Bradford, who is based in the New Orleans area, said the new store will anchor the development, an approximately 95,000-square-foot center called Ambassador Crossing. Bradford had no additional information on the development itself.
Whole Foods Market, which calls itself the “world’s leader in natural and organic foods,” was founded in Austin, Texas, in 1980. It now has more than 340 stores in North America and the United Kingdom.
The Lafayette store will be 36,200 square feet, Bradford says, which is sightly larger than the chain's Magazine Street location in New Orleans but smaller than its Baton Rouge and Metairie stores.
It will represent significant competition for The Fresh Market, located on Kaliste Saloom Road in River Ranch.
In the earnings call, the publicly traded company also confirmed it would add a second location later this year in New Orleans, a 25,000-square-foot store at Broad and Bienville streets. It will be the smallest Whole Foods in the state.
Once the two new stores open, Whole Foods will have five Louisiana locations.
MAY 23 Here's a story in the Picayune about some statistics that must come as a blow to folks who believe that any private school can do a better job of educating kids than any public school: Danielle Dreilinger reports that only 30 percent of the voucher kids are passing. That's less than half of the state wide average, she says. It's an interesting statistic because most of the schools (if not all) taking voucher kids have never had their students' standardized test scores released to the public before.
MAY 23 Stephen Sabludowsky blogs on Bayou Buzz about auditor requests here. Recently the state GOP started crowing about a request from the Legislative Auditor, claiming they were being targeted because of their anti-tax stance. (Uh, your what?) Denial and hyperbole aside, the state Democratic party blew holes in that theory with an email announcing they'd received the same request, Sabludowsky writes here.
MAY 23 Jim Brown blogs about the senate race in this post. He says that, given Bobby Jindal's "lack of traction" on the national stage, it might make more sense for the governor to consider running against Mary Landrieu for the senate seat. Since Tim Teeple left the Cassidy team, it makes sense he might land on a Jindal for Senate team, Brown opines.
MAY 23 In this Louisiana Voice post, blogger Tom Aswell writes of rumors that his nemesis, state Superintendent of Education John White, may be soon departing Louisiana for a federal post. It's hard to believe, given his performance, Aswell says, but stranger things have happened. An anti-White BESE member says that, if true, White is quitting before he can be fired.
MAY 23 In this post on American Zombie, blogger Jason Berry writes about the Mother's Day shooting. Mayor Landrieu said that "this is not who we are," but the fact is, this is New Orleans, Berry writes. The violence infused in the city is the result of a culture created by "sins of omission or sins of commission," Berry writes. It's not a problem that can be solved by legislating, policing, praying or publicizing, he says: Someone's got to understand what's happening first.
MAY 23 This post in the Westside Journal tells us what Port Allen Mayor Deedy has been up to lately: vetoing ordinances, apparently. This story is most interesting, however, when it delves into a petition that has been circulating around the city lately. It accuses the former mayor of a lot of nasty things; the former mayor says it is full of lies and "broken syntax" which may be a larger offense in his eyes.
MAY 23 This editorial posted in The Advocate is a bit confusing. The writing is poor - definitely not up to the usual editorial writing standard there - and the point is hard to grasp. Apparently, the writer is saying that privatization of state efforts is OK, as long as there is oversight and transparency, but Jindal's not good at that, and the legislature shouldn't over-react. Okey Dokey. Can't they get one of them Pulitzer-winning people to write an editorial?
MAY 23 This post on The Lens gives you links to a new Google Earth tool that allows you to see any spot on earth transform over the past 30 years. Bob Marshall, who covers the coast for the paper, says that in the case of Louisiana's coastline, it's possibly something you don't want to see, because it's not a pretty picture. There are several clips here, showing critical areas erode away. For Marshall, it was vindication for all those times he was met with eye-rolling when he talked about erosion.
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